Yes, probably. Most RAM on laptops is dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshing in order for its charge not to leak away.
There are a couple of ways that laptops can reduce this:
- They can have flash RAM: not a good option, since flash is slower, more expensive and generally more complex than dynamic;
- They can swap ram onto the disk: usually not all can be swapped in this way, but if most can, then you need suffer no penalty from the extra RAM. Swapped RAM will take time to be restored when the laptop wakes up.
Modern laptops have a series of states of sleep, which means they store less and less in RAM unswapped.
As suggested by David, powercfg /waketimers
showed the following output
C:\WINDOWS\system32>powercfg /waketimers El temporizador establecido
por [SERVICE] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System 32\svchost.exe
(SystemEventsBroker) expira a las 23:35:31 el 08/01/2017. Motivo:
Windows ejecutará la tarea programada 'NT TASK\Microsoft\Windows\Windo
wsUpdate\AUScheduledInstall' que solicitó la reactivación del equipo.
And a Google search pointed to this Microsoft answer:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-performance/auscheduledinstall-disabled-but-re-eneables-itself/4332d01e-62cd-4b1e-8b21-a12e181e413d
Basically two solutions are provided:
Method 1:
Follow the steps to detect and disable the device using Command Prompt (admin):
Press Windows+X keys and select Run as administrator.
Type the following command and hit Enter:
Powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
You will get the name/names of the devices. To disable a specific device from waking the computer, run the following command:
Powercfg -devicedisablewake "devicename"
Note: Make sure that you replace the “devicename”placeholder with the name of the device that you want to disable.
If this issue still occurs after you disable one device, disable the devices in this list one by one until you determine which device is causing the issue. If you want to re-enable a device to wake the computer, run the following command:
Powercfg -deviceenablewake "devicename" command.
If the issue still persists, proceed further to the next method.
Method 2:
Let's disable the option in Group Policy to avoid wake up patters of the computer through scheduled tasks:
Press Windows+R keys and select "gpedit.msc".
Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
Modify the "Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updates" policy.
Select Disabled from the list of options in this interface.
If you are unable to use the Group Policy Editor method or it's not available in the current version of Windows, use may use the Registry Editor method:
Disclaimer: Please make sure that you backup the registry before proceeding with the steps mentioned below:
Press Windows+R keys and type "regedit". Hit Enter.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU
(you may need to create the WindowsUpdate and AU keys) and create a DWORD value named AUPowerManagement. Set this value to 0.
Or create and import the following file AUPowerManagementDisable.reg
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"AUPowerManagement"=dword:00000000
Best Answer
From chronos's comment on the question:
I think the "Standby after" and "Hibernate after" options did it. It seems that Windows goes into standby with an alarm set to wake up at exactly [hibernate after] time, and when it wakes up it automatically hibernates. I don't know the details of the technology though, and since Darth Android completely misinterpreted the behavior in his answer, it might not be something that is supported by every computer or that everyone is aware of. (My laptop was purchased October 2006 though, so I'd expect all recent computers to exhibit this behavior)
By the way, desktops do something similar but a lot cooler, which is called Hybrid sleep; when you activate hybrid sleep, they save RAM to disk like hibernation, but then they enter standby rather than turning off. It's the best of both worlds: turning the PC back on is instant, but if power is lost, then next time the computer is awakened it will restore its RAM from disk.